Long time lurker, first time poster. Hope I did it right.
So I was reading the wikipedia page called “The Holocaust in Poland” and it has this paragraph under the header “Antisemitism”:
“Polish antisemitism had two formative motifs: claims of defilement of the Catholic faith; and Żydokomuna (Jew-communism). During the 1930s, Catholic journals in Poland paralleled western European social-Darwinist antisemitism and the Nazi press. However, church doctrine ruled out violence, which only became more common in the mid-1930s. Unlike German antisemitism, Polish political-ideological antisemites rejected the idea of genocide or pogroms of the Jews, advocating mass emigration instead.[a] Joseph Stalin’s occupation of terror in eastern Poland in 1939 brought what Jan Gross calls “the institutionalization of resentment”,[169] whereby the Soviets used privileges and punishments to accommodate and encourage ethnic and religious differences between Jews and Poles There was an upsurge in the anti-Semitic stereotype of Jews as Communist traitors; it erupted into mass murder when Nazi Germany invaded Soviet eastern Poland in the summer of 1941. A group of at least 40 Poles, with an unconfirmed level of German backing, murdered hundreds of Jews in the racially aggravated Jedwabne pogrom. There was a rash of other massacres of Jews across the same formerly Soviet-occupied region of Łomża and Białystok around the same time, with varying degrees of German death squad incitement or involvement: at Bielsk Podlaski (the village of Pilki), Choroszcz, Czyżew, Goniądz, Grajewo, Jasionówka, Kleszczele, Knyszyn, Kolno, Kuźnica, Narewka, Piątnica, Radziłów, Rajgród, Sokoły, Stawiski, Suchowola, Szczuczyn, Trzcianne, Tykocin, Wasilków, Wąsosz, and Wizna.[170]”
The text straight up blames Polish antisemitism and violence on Stalin and the Soviets. Obviously, this made me very suspicious. Does anyone know what it refers to, what the supposed evidence that the Soviets stoked antisemitic violence is, and have any alternative sources I can read?
Thanks!
EDIT: link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Poland#Antisemitism
rejected the idea of genocide or pogroms of the Jews, advocating mass emigration instead
You know I’m pretty sure the name for forcing a bunch of Jews to “emigrate” is pogrom.
It is so disgusting they try to paint Polish anti-Semitism as this civil and moderate antisemitism as opposed to the extreme German version. The German Nazis didn’t start out with building death camps, they started out pissing and moaning about how foreign the Jews were and how it would be in everyone’s best interest if they just moved somewhere else under various degrees of compulsion. As that policy proved inefficient both in the material removal of Jews from nazi-controlled areas as well as in the ability to satisfy the fascist mind’s hunger for ever-increasong cruelty, the Nazis switched to other methods like deliberate murder of all Jews.
Polish and German antisemitism shares exactly the same rotten core, the only difference was that he German variant had progressed further down the path than the Polish one.
Joseph Stalin’s occupation of terror in eastern Poland in 1939 brought what Jan Gross calls “the institutionalization of resentment”,[169] whereby the Soviets used privileges and punishments to accommodate and encourage ethnic and religious differences between Jews and Poles
this seems like a weird way of framing giving Jews rights if that’s what this means
The Polish government was explicitly anti-semitic but of course the Poles had nothing to do with the holocaust :very-smart:
The Holocaust was done by the Germans and the Germans only. Everyone else was just minding their own business when the Soviets came to oppress them.
Someone correct me if I am wrong here, but isn’t it basically a crime in Poland to say that Poland contributed to the Holocaust (which, as a Polish-American with family who were in the camps, is objectively true).
I just want to note that there’s an active group of Polish nationalists working on this part of the English Wikipedia who downplay Polish antisemitism and emphasize (real or imagined) Soviet and Nazi violence against Poles instead, so this is certainly an area where you shouldn’t trust Wikipedia.
Shameless self promo: I’m probably going to do a post all about the Khmielniki massacres in the 1600s as part of “Gehenna on Earth” but Poland has a long history of antisemitic violence tolerated and at time expressly encouraged by the Catholic Church.
This contempt was bred by familiarity. By the early 20th century Krakow, Lublin, and Warsaw were 25-50% Jewish by population. Jews became a major ethnic minority because Pagan Poland and Lithuania granted them more rights than any other European kingdom of “Empire” beginning around the 1400s.
“Hitler’s willing executioners” focuses largely on the Poles. And the put things in perspective 3 of the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust were from the pre-war area defined as Poland.
